The open question of ‘who gets to be Native in America’

Book Review The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America By Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz Flatiron: 304 pages, $29.99 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. “The Indian Card” begins with a statistical puzzle: In the 2000 U.S. census, 4.1 million people indicated Native American heritage. To be meaningful, a conversation about Native American heritage must take place at this level of granularity, Schuettpelz writes, because there are 347 recognized tribes in the contiguous United States: “Treating ‘Native America’ as a monolith is a bit like claiming interest in ‘Asian culture.’ There isn’t just one.” The federal government has its own complicated processes for recognizing tribes. For the federal government, however, defining tribes and counting Native Americans became crucial only because of brutal policies under President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, evicting individuals who had been enumerated on “muster rolls.” But the rolls themselves were shoddy, often based on cursory observations of supposed racial markers such as the color of skin, facial structure and hair texture, or on lists of members that tribal leaders provided under treaty terms. Unlike racist crackpot notions such as the supposed “one drop” rule that determined who could be enslaved or who would be subject to Jim Crow apartheid, when it came to determining who qualified as Native American, the white supremacist government held itself arbiter of who wasn’t Native based on certain percentages of white ancestry.